autism
oracknows | February 4, 2009It's really hard to take David Kirby seriously any more.
Well, actually, it's been hard to take him seriously for at nearly four years now, ever since he wrote his paean to antivaccinationists, Evidence of Harm, in which no conspiracy-mongering related to mercury as an alleged cause of autism was too out there, too ridiculous, for Kirby to parrot. Since then, he's become antivaccine apologist number one, the go-to guy for the antivaccine movement whenever the twisting of science, logic, and reason was needed to spin an event or a study that refutes the "vaccines cause autism" hypothesis. He's…
oracknows | January 28, 2009...it smells like...fisking.
In this case, it's a fisking of a particularly annoyingly self-righteous and scientifically ignorant antivaccinationist by a medical student. The annoying drinker of the "vaccines cause autism" Kool Aid is Ginger Taylor. The medical student is Adina Cappell. The slapdown is utterly comprehensive, methodical, and ruthless, pummeling Ginger's panoply of pseudoscience, logical fallacies, defenses of Jenny McCarthy, and conspiracy mongering under a barrage of science, reason, and fact, leaving nothing but smoldering ruins of antivaccinationist misinformation.
Even…
oracknows | January 27, 2009It looks like I've been sucked into another streak again.
Regular readers know that examining the claims of the antivaccine movement with skepticism, science, and critical thinking has been a theme of this blog from the very beginning. If there's one thing I've learned over the last four years, it's that vaccine news seems to come in streaks. Often weeks will pass without much, and, because the antivaccine wingnuttery over at, for example, The Huffington Post and Age of Autism is such a constant that it blurs into background noise, provoking my attention only when someone really brings the…
oracknows | January 26, 2009Beginning on Friday after my post expressing amazement at something as rare as a 70° F temperature in January (at least around my neck of the woods), namely an actual provaccine article in the Huffington Post, a number of you began sending me links to a story that I find most disturbing, a mini-tsunami that continued all weekend. In fact, it's so disturbing that I kept procrastinating all weekend until I wasn't even sure I was going to write about it at all. But the comments kept coming, and I realized once again that, once one gains a reputation as a go-to blogger about a certain topic,…
oracknows | January 23, 2009When it comes to science, I've always detested The Huffington Post.
Nearly four years ago, when Arianna Huffington's vanity group political blog went live, I was the first one to notice a most disturbing trend about it. As far as I knew at the time (or know now), I was the only one to have noticed that The Huffington Post had become a hotbed of antivaccine propaganda a mere three weeks after its launch. It was home to David Kirby, author of that paean to the mercury militia Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic, A Medical Controversy and now antivaccine blogger on both…
oracknows | January 22, 2009Being involved in clinical research makes me aware of the ethical quandaries that can arise. Fortunately for me, for the most part my studies are straightforward and don't provoke much in the way of angst over whether what I am doing is ethical or whether I'm approaching a line I shouldn't approach or crossing a line I shouldn't cross. However, there's lots of research that flirts with the unethical and sometimes even crosses the line. Institutional review boards are there to oversee the ethics of clinical trials and protect the human subjects who participate in them, but they don't always…
oracknows | January 16, 2009I hate to see this. I really do.
I really hate it to see people who think they're doing a good thing, who think they're raising money for a worthy charity, totally clueless that what they are doing is supporting the rankest pseudoscience and quackery. Here's an example from my hometown of Detroit. It's a story about a woman who's going to raise money for what she thinks is autism awareness and research at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this coming week:
When it comes to dressing for the North American International Auto Show Charity Preview, attendee Val McFarland is…
purepedantry | January 14, 2009The NYTimes profiles Paul Offit, author of Autism's False Prophets. Offit has been taking the anti-vaccine lobby to task over pseudoscience, and he hasn't been winning many friends in the process:
Those backing Dr. Offit say he was forced into the role. Opponents of vaccines have held rallies, appeared on talk shows like "Oprah" and "Imus in the Morning," been the heroes of made-for-TV movies and found a celebrity spokeswoman in Jenny McCarthy, the actress and former Playboy model who has an autistic son. Meanwhile, the response from public health officials has been muted and couched in dull…
oracknows | January 13, 2009About four weeks ago, I wrote what I thought to be an amusing piece about how our blog "buddy" J. B. Handley, antivaccine advocate extraordinaire and now second fiddle in the organization he founded (Generation Rescue) to a Jenny-come-lately former purveyor of Indigo Child woo previously best known for being Playboy Playmate of the Year, a game show hostess on MTV, the star of her own short-lived sitcom, and a gross-out comedienne known for eating her own vomit or sitting in a pool of her own menstrual blood. Unfortunately, along with her A-list boyfriend Jim Carrey, this former D-list star…
gregladen | January 12, 2009A study recently published by Irva Hertz-Picciotto and Lora Delwiche of the M.I.N.D. Institute, UC Davis, addresses the question of an apparent rise in the frequency of diagnosed autism in California.
This study is quickly becoming the focus of attention as the various factions with an interest in autism square off on assessing its validity. In the mean time, the study itself is rather modest in what it attempts and what it concludes.
Let's have a look.
To date, there are three kinds of explanations given for this rise in Autism rate:
1) There is some artifact in the system such as…
amillikan | January 12, 2009This week, our regularly scheduled "Science Saturday" feature has become "Science Monday" due to some technical difficulties during our most recent upgrade. But the video is now up and features some of our very own bloggers, Janet (AKA Dr. Freeride) from Adventures in Ethics and Science, and Peter Lipson (AKA Dr. Pal) who contributes to Denialism Blog and regularly hosts thrilling podcasts.
This week, Janet and Dr. Pal explore the ethics behind different issues in medicine and science such as conscience clauses (for example, in which pharmacists can withhold prescriptions from consumers), the…
oracknows | January 10, 2009I don't watch Private Practice. I didn't like Grey's Anatomy, which, every time I caught part of it, struck me as the cheesiest sort of medical soap opera, a General Hospital transplanted to prime time. Given that Private Practice is a spinoff of Grey's Anatomy, I never saw any reason whatsoever to watch. However, on Thursday night an episode aired that royally pissed off the antivaccine contingent, and that has to be a good thing. The episode, Contamination, featured a storyline in which an unvaccinated child shows up in the emergency room with the measles. The parents are antivaccine and…
oracknows | January 5, 2009Over the last year and a half, Jenny McCarthy has been, unfortunately, a fairly frequent topic of this blog. There is, of course, a reason for this. Ever since she published her first book on autism back in the summer of 2007, she has become the public face of the antivaccine movement and autism quackery. Indeed, Generation Rescue, that reliable bastion of antiscientific antivaccine pseudoscience and autism quackery, has been--shall we say?--rebranded as "Jenny McCarthy's Autism Organization." In the process, she has demonstrated a level of burning stupid that defies description, a stupidity…
oracknows | January 2, 2009Now that 2009 is about to kick into gear, I have to look back at 2008 one last time to acknowledge one failure. As a backdrop to that failure, I note that the antivaccine propaganda site Age of Autism has posted a series of their People of the Year "awards" for 2008, including, antivaccine luminaries such as:
Person of the Year: Dr. Bernardine Healy. Just because a hack political appointee known to tilt science to be in line with ideology hops on the "too many too soon" bandwagon, AoA thinks it has a legitimate argument from authority. It doesn't.
Couple of the Year: Jenny McCarthy and Jim…
oracknows | December 31, 2008I know, I know, I've criticized P.Z. Myer's poll-crashing proclivities as being childish and pointless. However, so few people seem to agree with my take on it that I'm wondering whether, if I can't beat 'em I should join 'em. So let's try it out.
On the Obama Transition Team website, Generation Rescue has put up this question (just type in the search term "Generation Rescue" to find the question:
Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey were named 2008 Couple of the Year (www.ageofautism.com) due to their advocacy work for Generation Rescue. Why hasn't the Transistion Team made autism a top priority…
oracknows | December 26, 2008Welcome back. I hope you and yours who celebrate Christmas have had a happy one. Ours was kind of mixed and bittersweet for reasons that I don't particularly feel like going into now, although sooner or later I will probably have to say something about it. In the meantime, as much as I hate to be a downer right after the holidays, when many of my readers have the day off and are looking forward to hanging out with family or friends or maybe attacking the Boxing Day sales in the U.K. or just the sales in the U.S. and elsewhere. However, just before the holidays and shortly before I gave a…
oracknows | December 23, 2008I'm happy to say, I've never watched an episode of The Doctors, at least if the episode segment I've just been sent is any indication of the quality of the science and medicine discussed on the TV show. The episode, which aired on December 11, featured a segment on autism featuring an old "friend" of the blog. The fact that he was featured on a television show ostensibly designed to discuss medicine and make it accessible to a general audience tells me that not only the producers but the physicians who do the show are utterly without a clue. No, it wasn't J.B. Handley or Jenny McCarthy, but…
oracknows | December 21, 2008As much as I'd love to take credit, the postponement of the appearance of Jenny McCarthy and J.B. Handley on Larry King Live! originally scheduled for last night had nothing to do with me. Really. The cancellation was apparently announced shortly after my post appeared, leaving no time for it to have had an effect. Heck, for all I know the cancellation had occurred before I posted and I just hadn't noticed.
Despite all the insinuations of dire conspiracies in the comments of the Age of Autism post on the cancellation, it's far more likely that Larry King probably just didn't want to work on…
oracknows | December 20, 2008The other day, I had a bit of fun with an "old friend," namely J. B. Handley, founder of the antivaccine organization Generation Rescue and now third banana on the antivaccine front to Jenny McCarthy and her boy-toy Jim Carrey. Displeased at my little jabs, he showed up in the comments spewing his usual antivaccine canards and misinformation about various studies before, like Brave Sir Robin, turning his tale to flee, bragging that he was "off to do another interview."
Now I know what "interview" he's heading off to. Forwarded to me was this e-mail:
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20th
Join Generation…
oracknows | December 18, 2008You may have noticed that I've been laying off the antivaccination movement recently. Indeed, it's been over two weeks since I last mentioned the topic, and then I only did so by briefly citing a post by Steve Novella. For this blog, aside from vacations, that has to be a record.
Truth be told, periodically I get really burned out on the topic, as I've pointed out from time to time. I frequently make jokes about the thermonuclearly burning stupid that regularly emanates from such "luminaries" of the antivaccine movement as Jenny McCarthy, David Kirby, Dan Olmsted, J. B. Handley, and others.…